THE ACTIVITY OF PREFIXAL UNITS IN THE TERMINOLOGICAL SYSTEM OF THE UZBEK LANGUAGE

Abstract

The article examines the activity of prefixal units in the terminological system of modern Uzbek. Prefixation, marginal in the general lexicon of an agglutinative and suffixing language, is disproportionately frequent in terminology, and the reason lies in the properties that terminology requires of its units: systematicity, transparency, brevity and international recognisability. The study describes the distribution of prefixal formatives across four terminological domains — medicine, technology and information technology, economics, and law and administration — and shows that each domain is associated with a characteristic set of formatives, such as giper- and gipo- in medicine, avto-, elektro- and kiber- in technology, makro- and mikro- in economics, and anti- and de- in law and administration. It then examines the term-forming advantages of prefixation, namely its capacity to build regular oppositional pairs and to produce compact equivalents of analytic descriptions, and the normative problems it creates, principally orthographic variation and the competition between a prefixal term and its native analytic synonym.